Homeworld

A New Dimension

Homeworld is a refreshing new take on the real time strategy genre,
abandoning the usual forest, ice, desert and volcanic worlds of
most RTS games and instead setting the action in deep space.

Amazingly it works .. more or less. Controlling fast moving
starships in a fully three dimensional space can be a little
disorientating at times, but the interface and control system are
fairly intuitive.

The game also features a full tutorial mission to get you started.
You'll still need to refer to the manual for more advanced orders
and details of all the different units, but the tutorial does a
good job of covering all the basics and making you feel at home.

Once you've got the hang of things, it's time to start the game
itself. You control a small fugitive fleet in search of your lost
Homeworld, pursued by hostile aliens. Yes, this is "Battlestar
Galactica : The Game" in all but name...

The storyline is pushed along nicely by a mix of in-game briefings
during the missions, and pre-drawn black and white cutscenes
between them. It's all very dramatic, and keeps the game moving at
a fair pace.

Mission : Impossible

Gestalt gives the AI a pounding

The missions
themselves can be a little slow though. Some of them take hours to
complete, often with virtually nothing happening for a lot of that
time.

The AI is mostly harmless, rarely counter-attacking even if you
leave your mothership wide open. Usually you are left to gather
resources, build up your fleet, and then launch an attack when
you're ready.

But if the computer does decide to launch an offensive, you'll know
all about it. When the AI brings a big enough fleet together in one
place it can be a real challenge just to survive, let alone win.

Given that your fleet is carried over from one mission to the next
and resources are often scarce, losing too many ships to an enemy
attack can make the next mission even more difficult.

Your own ships suffer from AI problems as well, often sitting idle
while the ship next to them is pulverized by an entire enemy fleet.
I guess they're not big on self-preservation...

The Final Frontier

The space graveyard, a scrapyard for the remains of ancient starships

The only other problem is that space (by definition) is big
and empty. There's no real terrain to control or defend, which
leaves the tactical part of the game a little hollow at times.

Space does at least look interesting in Homeworld though,
with dust clouds, asteroid belts, radioactive supernova remnants,
and giant cosmic scrapyards. Even the backdrops are big, brash and
colourful.

Explosions and weapons fire are also spectacular, and the ships
look great as well. Best of all, the game can throw dozens of them
around on screen effortlessly. It takes a really big battle before
you start to see any slow down.

This does mean some trade-off though, and in Homeworld's case it's
visual range. You can only see a relatively short distance, and
ships outside that range are invisible to you until you switch to
the sensors manager, which gives you a view of the entire area.

It helps keep the frame rates up, but looks a bit unnatural at
first. Once you've played for a while though you will hardly notice
it.

Fleet Manoeuvers

Ooooh .. that's gotta hurt

There is also a basic
research element to the game, but this is fairly stunted in single
player mode as you are only given one or two new technologies to
research each mission.

It really takes off in multiplayer and skirmish modes though, where
the entire research tree is available to you. The speed at which
you gain advanced technologies, allowing you to produce new units
like cloaked fighters and missile destroyers, can make the
difference between winning and losing.

In fact, multiplayer is the game's real strongpoint. Finding other
players is easy thanks to the built in chat rooms, and setting up
or joining a game is just as simple.

Using a 33.6k modem, even chaotic four player games were remarkably
smooth. There were occasional lock-ups when one of the players
lagged out for a few seconds, but generally it worked well.

The skirmish mode (multiplayer against computer controlled
opponents) also works well. In fact the AI performs much better
than it does in the single player campaign for some reason,
harrying and attacking your fleet constantly instead of just
sitting back and waiting.

There are also a whole host of different options to fiddle with -
victory conditions, resource levels, bounties, supplies... It all
adds up to a lot of replay potential.

Conclusion

A bit of a one-sided fight...

Despite being the first
true spacefaring real time strategy game, Homeworld comes close to
hitting the mark.

The visuals are beautiful, the soundtrack atmospheric, the single
player campaign (mostly) engaging, and the multiplayer is
excellent. It's only really let down by suspect AI and a few
tedious missions.
Release Date - available now

Eye Candy

Download The Demo

Don't take my word for it though, try before you buy with the
Homeworld
demo (63Mb).

9
/
10

HomeworldGestaltTaking strategy into the third dimension.1999-10-26T17:27:00+01:00910